


Crawl, Race, Soar

by atlasaxis



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Canon Character of Color, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Graphic Description, No Smut, One-Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-12
Updated: 2016-06-12
Packaged: 2018-07-14 14:26:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7175597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atlasaxis/pseuds/atlasaxis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Toast was the first Imperator declared by the popular consensus of the War Boys, rather than by the calamitous blessing of Immortan Joe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Crawl, Race, Soar

The first day was the hardest. They were, to a woman, in a post-adrenaline haze that left them shivering and blank-faced at the entrance to their former prison vault. It was Furiosa slowly dropping from Toast and Capable’s shoulders in a resigned faint that made the four of them collectively focus. “The Organic was on one of Joe’s cars…” Cheedo uttered as she slipped a hand under Furiosa’s head and stared helplessly at her battered body, the price of their perhaps temporary victory rendered in torn flesh. “That butcher, finally shredded in a metal cocoon instead of shearing wings off bugs!” hissed Dag as she emerged from the vault with a bowl of water. Capable slid her pale arms under Furiosa’s back to help Cheedo support the rasping woman to a semi sitting position. “He had helpers. War pups to do his bidding. They will know something helpful, more than I do. How do we get them here to help? What if they won’t help?” A red braid trailed into a red rivulet slicking over leather belts, unnoticed, as Capable trickled water over Furiosa’s sweating brow and slack lips. Toast was facing away, looking down the dim hallway with a wicked moon-silver knife in one hand and a sun-hot gun in the other. She clenched her jaw. “We’ll make them help, softly or sharply. She must not die today.” 

Toast had come to the vault at a later age than the other captive women, and remembered a father who loved her enough to give her a gun on her tenth birthday, and spent the next year teaching her the care and use of it. The year after that it was knives, and the year after that she had reached the limit of her aspirations to be taller than her father, and it was time for fists. The following year her present was getting to put a whole clip into the carcass of the man who killed her father, before she was bludgeoned by another scavenger, and so entered the darkness that she never woke from. The darkness shifted into the shadows of the Citadel’s rough-hewn lithic bowels, to the twilight of the dirty-windowed vault, to the nightmares of being shackled to a bed and raped that made even the nights when it was not actually occurring no less enraging. This darkness lasted until she was too close to the rotting flesh of suddenly mortal Immortan Joe for the last time, driving the Gigahorse on the last stretch to the Citadel. It was like waking up when she spat on him.

The education she received from her sisters was much different than that of her father, but the lessons were on survival nonetheless. It was Angharad who finally diverted Toast from attempts to maim every servile Keeper or leering War Boy that they had limited contact with, to attempts to make herself less appealing instead: “He delights in your struggle. It makes him feel stronger to take you when you fight, even though he’s too pathetically weak to get you in chains himself. Toast, look at me. He will want you less if you do nothing.” The others studiously looked to Miss Giddy sitting in a mote of dusty sunlight next to the pool, orating a long story that mostly took place on a desert of rolling hills made of water rather than sand. So they did not see Toast folding into Angharad’s lap for the first kind touch since the dry kiss her father had pressed to her forehead the morning before the nightmare began. It was the Dag who produced the sewing scissors to cut Toast’s long brown hair the next day, despite her usual indifference towards the other wife. The pale woman understood about small acts of defiance in the face of oppression, though, her nimble tattood fingers making short work of the shearing as Angharad smiled radiantly. Toast noticed then how precise the scars on the side of Angharad’s too-splendid face were. Nimble fingers on a loving hand had made them, avoiding cutting too deep or too close to eyes. Toast did not fight back when she was beaten for altering her appearance. She whispered to Angharad about escape, and Angharad whispered back about a War Boy named Furiosa.

The sisters had sent Toast and Capable to gather the Organic’s war pups to tend to Furiosa, made alliances with the Milking Mothers and the Keepers of the living quarters and those living in the primary stone spire, and slept curled together for the night and most of the day following their prodigal return. When they were all awake and the quiet conversation turned from the events of the escape to what must be done next to avoid a redux of the recent status quo in the Citadel, the subject of the remaining War Boys arose. “I'll go, assess the situation, talk to them.” Toast interjected. The Dag and Cheedo abruptly stopped debating whether the War Boys would kill them on sight or try to keep them as wives and put one of their own number at the levers of the water spouts. Capable looked thoughtful. “I wonder if they might understand talking back and forth. I think they have only known orders and punishment, and it might confuse them to have too few orders at first. Of course, we shouldn’t try to punish them like they have been.” Her eyes turned hollow as she remembered an account of the physical torture that the average War Boy endured being whispering over her shoulder by scarred lips. She and Nux had talked long into the night they spent on the Vuvalini’s patch. Toast untucked one arm from around her knees where she sat balled amongst the blankets and pillows they had nested in on the floor, to reach for the oil lamp that guarded their nights from the monsters waiting behind closed eyelids. Her right hand, still calloused along her first finger but soft on the palm, swiped soot from the lamp’s precious glass chimney and then encircled her eyes with black, pulled streaks down the sides of her nose. “I didn’t say talk nice.”

Toast was the first Imperator declared by the popular consensus of the War Boys, rather than by the calamitous blessing of Immortan Joe. Joe’s Imperators had life expectancies similar to the imperfect children born of the Wretched, so Imperators traditionally accepted their titles with the assurance of Valhalla having been notified of their imminent arrival.

Five howling and leaking War Boys later, Toast had the undivided attention of the recently unemployed and leaderless professional killers who populated the biggest room in the second level of the spire. She scanned the room lit by meager carved windows on the rock face side, and realized that these were the weakest and most inexperienced of them, that as far as she knew most of them had died in the chase after the war rig. She had killed some of them. She slitted her eyes. “Where is Immortan Joe, War Boys?” her voice echoed slightly. A sussurus, angry, unsure. “Our beloved Imperator Furiosa ripped his face off. Shredded it with a chain.” None of them had known what had happened before the Gigahorse had limped into the Citadel with a corpse, a man, and five women, but some of them didn’t believe the body had really been Joe. He was a god. “Let me tell you a story about a greedy man.” 

She stood before the fifty or so War Boys left, tiny and defiant, her leathers and black pants spattered with their blood. She talked about the invention of a religion, about how people born to a way of life might not have much of a choice in believing lies about a better life elsewhere. She admitted that she did not know if something like Valhalla existed, but that the afterlife might not matter so much if there was a life worth living at the Citadel. A life with enough water (you, shut your gob, it’s not an addiction, it’s oil for the the engine of your body), enough food, and hopefully healing for their many ailments. A life with no Cutters looming in the dungeons far below them to punish those who asked too many questions or didn’t work themselves to death after surviving an improbable number of raids, like Ace before Furiosa claimed him for her crew. “And if you don’t believe the Immortan dead and the way us sisters offer you a good choice, then believe this: we have the Milking Mothers and the Keepers with us, and we occupy the top, where the water levers are. You can try to wait us out, but how long will you last when chaos erupts among the Wretched, the pups are crying for aqua cola, and there is nothing to trade for guzzoline and bullets? We don’t want to hurt you, but we will survive you.” 

There was a silence, and then a War Boy near the front of the stark and dying colorless crowd spat to the side and said warily “So you saying you ain't a Wife then?” Toast’s teeth gleamed white in her black-smeared face, shiny white as a skull’s. “You the smartest of the bunch then? I was never a willing wife. I was a slave, and before that I was free. Now I’m a free sister. What do you care? Looking for a wife, are you?” She sneered, but she uncoiled from the fighter’s stance she had been poised in since she took down the War Boys that had unwisely challenged her entry, and she took two steps towards the painfully thin War Boy that had spoken. “Nah.” He grinned and looked behind him at the others, who were rightly lost and still mildly hostile, but listening. He uncrossed his arms slowly as he looked back to Toast, and reached two fingers into his own eye sockets to pull down streaks of grease paint along his crooked nose in an imitation of her soot marks. “Was looking for an Imperator, but they all died or nearly. Now I’m looking at one.”

When Toast’s search party returned from scouring the mountainous rift to the east for survivors of the Mad Chase, as it was now dubbed by Bones the mouthy War Boy, she found that her sisters had been industrious to the point of exhaustion for the last four days. Toast was emerging from a hot cab and unwrapping the grey scarf she had wound around her face in her customary cowl when Cheedo met them. She had elected to take one of the smaller exterior lifts down to the yard outside the garage that occupied the whole ground level of the spire, and impatiently hopped the last two feet from the lift to the ground. The young woman now clad in a long dress and sandals ran up to hug Toast tightly, relief making her inattentive of the War Boys emerging from the pursuit cars around them. “I’m so glad you’re back! We’ve been doing ok, Furiosa’s getting better, but there’s so much to take care of and wait until you hear what the kitchens have been feeding the War Boys and the pups!” Toast saw Cheedo’s brown eyes widen with horror at the last rush of words, and bit her lip to keep from laughing. 

Cheedo had been a wife but a year, and had lived a remarkably sheltered life with three younger children as the stolen but protected wards of the Bullet Farmer before she was traded to Joe. She did not know that most people had eaten other people at some point. “Can’t be any worse than old Joe’s smelly prick.” Toast said in a carrying voice with a biting grin. At that, one of her War Boys stumbled the dismount from the lancer’s perch on a car and bit the packed dirt. Bones laughed uproariously from his position behind Toast’s left flank, and prodded the fallen man’s ribs with the toe of his boot. “Don’t you remember what Imperator Toast said when she was speechifying, Ratchet? You don’t have to eat sand, the Sisters are feeding us proper now.” 

The only slightly unkind laughter of the others faded to a quiet in which the hot ticking of the cooling engines was audible as pale heads turned towards a streak of vermilion emerging from the garage. Capable ran to Toast and Cheedo even as she scanned the War Boys and the bristling cars and bikes of the party, her too-big canvas jacket flapping. “Did you… find him?” She hitched out, dread turning her soft features tight as she heaved to catch her breath. Toast held her eyes and nodded. “I know you hoped, but it was too bad of a smash up even for someone who couldn’t seem to die. We found the body and brought it back so you could…” Toast stopped as Capable clung to Cheedo and wept, still gasping chest-wracking swallows of dry air. Toast looked uncomfortably away from Capable, to Bones, who had hoisted up the unfortunate Ratchet and was looking on with an air of astonishment as near as she could tell through the paint. Bones noticed her staring at him, hastily looked away, then peered back at her raised eyebrow. Toast knew they were unaccustomed to being allowed to speak without being spoken to by a superior, but Bones was seemingly either braver or even less self-preserving than the others. 

Toast wondered if he had been left behind because he appeared too spindly to lift a gecko or because of his irrepressible conviviality. “She leaking water over that crisped Boy we pried outta the war rig, boss?” Toast nodded once, waiting for the real question. An awkward moment later, as Cheedo led Capable into the shade of the garage to take refuge somewhere cooler and more private, no doubt, came “Why is Sister Capable leaking over the Boy? He was with them that was trying to slave you again, yeah?” Every War Boy that had gone out with them was pretending to be busy unloading as they listened. Toast pressed her fingers to her still bruised ribs for a handful of seconds, suddenly weary to her core. “His name was Nux. I didn’t make friends with him like Capable did, but he was the first War Boy to help us. He helped us get the war rig unstuck with Max the Fool, he fixed the engine when we was coming back here, and he rolled the rig apurpose to collapse the rocks at the ravine behind us. Joe probably made up Valhalla (several Boys compulsively but furtively laced their fingers into V8’s in superstitious warding) but if any of you were ever awaited, it was that chatty bastard.” Toast’s shoulders were drooping, but she sighed and straightened up to bark “Now someone get a message to Furiosa. She’ll want to see Ace. Let’s get the other survivors to the top and stow the fleet so that we can get some cool water and fresh grub for ourselves!” The attentive War Boys started to scramble.


End file.
